This Week in Books: In the Midst
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Dear Reader,
In the midst of a pandemic,
How will schools reopen? How to virtually network? How to sell?
Creativity. Employee retention. Perimeter pest control.
Nurturing community. Keeping a healthy brain. Finding silver linings. Finding moments of grace and gold.
Who, if anyone, would be ambitious enough to show up hours in advance?
White House hosts a party. The world is on fire.
Ready or not, baby is coming. The campaign comes. Duplex sequencing comes of age. Arabbers’ mission becomes more urgent. Fresno Unified school meals continue to be served. Republicans continue their attacks on Americans’ health care. Latino actors, producers, directors and creators meet in NALIP’s first virtual summit. The open contracting community has recommendations. The administration was hobbling the ability of the nation's public health agency to gather and analyze crucial data.
It’s common to feel stress levels rise every time we hear the word “virus”.
What opera in Germany looks like. What football training feels like. What to expect during the upcoming school year. Orange County’s hurricane prep. Major concerns about traveling to Florida. Planned school reopenings from across the Denver metro area. A refugee crisis rivaling any witnessed in modern history. An epidemic. Formidable barriers to designing, implementing, and completing clinical trials.
Oh my gosh, you’re going to have to get on a plane and like go to this different location.
Industrial projects are at an all-time high. California weighs diesel regulations. Sports trying to make a comeback. The Department of the Air Force is highlighting its annual Fall Prevention Focus at home and on the job. Local poll workers prepare for an election. Old Market bars still recovering. Tourists flock to Broadway. Wolfies to open. New coffee shop brews up business. Sales on the rise for local retailers. Tattoo artists prepare to get back to work. The federal government has given billions of dollars to corporations. The U.S. stock market has managed to recover the bulk of its losses this year. Finance transformation remains a priority. Gun violence surges. White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany is attempting to forcibly redirect the narrative. 56 percent of respondents believe that general business conditions will be somewhat better six months from now. Tuesday's election sure to be different. Texas leads renewed effort to kill Obamacare. Leaders of Pastors for Texas Children—including several Texas Baptist ministers—have asked the Texas Education Agency to offer schools clear health and safety guidelines.
Now is the time for the nation to take stock. It’s especially tough. There’s a war over health insurance. Starting up schools again may seem like a tall order. ‘Home’ takes on new importance. Electric car sales doubled. Shortages of antidepressant Zoloft reported.
Birds are constant. Tensions flare. Even the company was surprised by the increased demand for a $1,000 vacuum. Don’t disrupt the supply chain for drugs. This couple found a quiet corner of the Lincoln Memorial to marry. We see the best in humanity. High school sports will be tough to restart. TVA refuels three nuclear plants. We need to prepare for an active hurricane season.
Is it timely to launch a business? What can firms do now?
Remembering a disaster. Remembering an oil spill. Survival tips for high performers and perfectionists. How four creatives are finding light. How two DTC brands found success. How to keep love alive. How to heed privacy law. A misguided focus on stakeholders. Reinvigorating the economy. Notes from practising a meditative fast. The benefits of exercising. The art of the pitch. College planning. Courage and caring. Small mercies. Premature birth. Silence. Wedding planning advice. Project based learning. Assessments and grading. Hope. Finding hope. Finding hope. Finding hope in the arts. Finding opportunity. Searching for prophecy. Rethinking sidewalks and streets. Keeping grocery shelves stocked. Ensuring mission readiness. Protecting nature. Protecting your mental health. Evaluating Black life through a different lens. Ways to celebrate July 4th. Bad time for city council to take a summer break.
Where do renters turn for assistance?
Community members are rallying to support one another. Georgetown County announces plans for unique hurricane season. Solution providers are transforming the way they do business. The Cache County Council has proclaimed a day of prayer on July 19 seeking “healing, comfort, wisdom and deliverance”.
How to onboard employees? How to make effective business decisions? How do you safely launch a new condo and make it the hottest ticket in town?
July 5 was a darker day than most.
Things will be a little bit different.
As “together” as we could be. We remain. Grateful for kind neighbors.
Stay safe out there,
Dana
1. “Insane after coronavirus?” by Patricia Lockwood, The London Review of Books
Patricia Lockwood writes about her scary experience with covid, including the lingering aftereffects, which devastated her ability to read and comprehend books.
I… told her it was as if I was living in that terrible movie Regarding Henry, in which Harrison Ford gets shot in the head during a convenience-store hold-up and afterwards becomes a mental child and can no longer make love to his wife. I used to be able to do this; I know I used to be able to do this. I used to be able to make love to Harrison Ford’s wife!...
One day I realised I couldn’t remember my phone number, another that I couldn’t remember my brother’s middle name. But the most stubborn fact seemed to be that I had forgotten how to read. So I set myself a syllabus of maniacal intensity, as if to put the alphabet back in order after a tower of blocks had tumbled down. There was no particular logic governing the books I chose, and more than a hint of lunacy: at one point I ploughed my way through both Marjorie Morningstar and Shogun. Sentences were sometimes as clear as if they had been blown by bugles; at other times they were dribble that barely stayed fastened on the page. An African in Greenland I read in one shining burst of comprehension, each word as firm in my mouth as a bite of whale blubber. I remember all of The Corner That Held Them and none of Dead Souls – I just kept underlining sentences where Chichikov was described as neither fat nor thin. I recall little of the revolutionary second half of Summer Will Show, but the first section, with its descriptions of Sophia Willoughby’s children feverish and dying of smallpox after being dangled over the lime-kiln by an infected man, seems highlighted on the page with real sun: ‘Don’t drop me, don’t drop me! My mouth’s hot. I looked at hell with my mouth, my mouth’s burning. Hannah! Come and take hell out of my mouth, take it out, I say!’
I have never been a straightforward reader, preferring to linger inside the cupboards of those paragraphs that describe Aunt March’s turquoise rings. Yet all of a sudden I wanted to read a book from cover to cover and be able to say what it was about. What is this about, I thought, what are books about? I read crazily, as if I were a train and the last page was Anna Karenina. I broke down crying one afternoon over Mani, knowing that if I were to take a test on the book after I finished, my page would read simply, ‘He... went... to... Greece?’
2. “The Collected Poems of Bob Kaufmann” by David Grundy, Music & Literature
David Grundy writes about the life of Bob Kaufman in an exhilarating review of the recently published Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman.
…it was in 1957, when he returned to the city, that he rose to prominence amongst those soon to be dubbed “beatniks”—a term reputedly of his own invention. Kaufman later told Raymond Foye, “I feel at home in this neighborhood […] When I’m lost and alone, and Paul Robeson is singing the Soviet national anthem in my head, and I can’t sleep, I go out and walk these streets, and I feel at home.” Transferring his politics from union activism to the anti-bourgeois rejection of normative, “square” lifestyles, it was Kaufman of all the Beats who perhaps lived the Beat ethos to its fullest: committed to spontaneity, resistant to writing down his poems, and steeped in a relentless experience of social marginalization. Having been beaten by racists while working as a labor organizer in the South, Kaufman had been rendered deaf in one ear and lost several teeth. In San Francisco, he was targeted by racist police riled by his non-conformity, his interracial marriage to Eileen Singe Kaufman and outspoken politics… in 1960, Kaufman, Eileen, and their son Parker relocated to New York, entering another Bohemian milieu around the so-called East Village. Kaufman was friends with artists such as pianist Cecil Taylor and poet John Wieners. He crashed on the floor of a young poet named Ishmael Reed… New York was not necessarily an easier place than San Francisco: the Kaufmans moved from apartment to apartment, both Bob and Eileen spending time in Bellevue psychiatric hospital, and Bob in Rikers Island. Resolving to return to San Francisco, Kaufman was on his way to meet Eileen and Parker when he was arrested for walking on the grass in Washington Square Park and transferred to a series of psychiatric hospitals, where he was subjected unwillingly to brutal electroshock “treatment.” Released in fall 1963, Kaufman rejoined his family in San Francisco, but he had been badly affected. When John F. Kennedy was assassinated that November, he took a ten-year vow of silence, and much of his subsequent behavior may have resulted from the institutional torture he suffered. Kaufman’s life had effectively been destroyed for the simple act of walking on the grass.
Grundy notes that it was the women in Kaufman’s life who wrote his poems down, and women critics who have championed his work: “It’s largely thanks to the efforts of women, and the advocacy of Black writers and critics such as Barbara Christian who valued Kaufman’s work, that he is slowly being restored to his rightful place in the overwhelming white, male narrative of ‘Beat’ writing to which we’re accustomed.”
3. “Reading the Literature of Grief During a Pandemic” by Megan Evershed, The New Republic
In a review of Victoria Chang’s Obit and Natalie Bakopoulos’s Scorpionfish, Megan Evershed writes that these days she is drawn to books about grief.
If grief, like the virus itself, permeates the very medium through which we live and breathe, then literature is a way of concentrating it, reducing it to the size of a book you can hold in your hands. And in bracketing books about loss together on a mental bookshelf, individual experiences can become a mosaic, transforming grief into a kind of solidarity…
Reading them offers the “soul-swaddling” feeling of sharing intensely personal experiences with others—which can be its own strange type of sweetness.
Regarding Scorpionfish, Evershed says: “The tone of the book… is emptied, the prose scraped clean of adornment. Mira in no way resembles the spiny, venomous scorpionfish of the title; her voice lies flat, as if attempting to avoid detection. Throughout the novel, secondary characters frequently leave Athens… The novel is thick with the memory of missing people, which creates a kind of ghost landscape alongside the physical terrain of the city.”
In Obit, which Evershed explains “is a collection of prose poems, modeled after narrow newspaper obituaries,” Chang writes: “Grief is the row of eggs waiting in the cold to lose their shape.”
4. “Writing Nearby” by Allisen Hae Ji Lichtenstein, Guernica
Allisen Hae Ji Lichtenstein reviews Cathy Park Hong’s essay collection Minor Feelings.
[Hong] looks for methods to speak across divides—to find ways to unite the experiences of other people, artists, and communities of color. In comedy, Hong finds one such method: a transparency that she failed to find in poetry. Comedians, she writes, have “nowhere to hide,” and so they are forced to “acknowledge their identities.” But white writers are able to, as Roland Barthes describes, use their writing as “the trap where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes it.”
Hong experiences a “shock of recognition” when first watching Richard Pryor’s Live in Concert. By exposing his shame to the audience and imbuing his jokes with melancholy, Pryor reminds Hong of the Korean han:“a complicated combination of bitterness, wistfulness, shame, melancholy, and vengefulness, accumulated from years of brutal colonialism, war, and US-supported dictatorship.” So much of han lies in the way certain feelings are carried in the body and soul, ever-present, and Pryor exposes the darkest part of his traumas onstage.
5. “Philosophies of Distance and Proximity: Who Are We When We’re Alone?” by Corina Stan, Lit Hub & The Point
To reflect on the philosophical potential of the viral lockdown era, Corina Stan draws on her book The Art of Distances, which is an examination of how twentieth-century writers such as George Orwell, Elias Canetti, Iris Murdoch, and Roland Barthes dealt with the idea of “living together.”
Elias Canetti... was obsessed with crowds, convinced that the ideologies that shaped the 20th century—communism and fascism—and the human disasters that ensued could be explained by people’s overwhelming desire to be part of a crowd and thus cancel the distances of everyday life...
In fact, many of the thinkers of the past century have couched their diagnoses of the contemporary world in a vocabulary of distance and proximity. Under the auspices of Barthes’s declaration that “we need a science, or perhaps an art, of distances,” a region of thought opens up where we might find some bearings, now that what we usually take for granted as our everyday life has been disrupted.
6. “When Art Is Life, but All Life Is Work” by Wen Zhuang, The Los Angeles Review of Books
Wen Zhuang interviews Leigh Claire La Berge, author of Wages Against Artwork, a critique of the contemporary art-industrial complex in which La Berge asks, “When all life is work, when should we get paid and for what? For showing up at work? For the time it takes to travel there? For (not) sleeping through the night?” Zhuang writes that “La Berge shows how socially engaged artists respond to what she terms ‘decommodified labor’—the slow diminishment of wages alongside an increase in the demands of work—and how the expansion of MFA programs and student debt create the conditions for this labor.” In the interview, they discuss how the situation has evolved with the coming of the pandemic. Says La Berge:
…universities, particularly private, particularly smaller schools, they’re overleveraged, right? They’re not secure financially. They rely on the federal government to indebt a huge number of students to be able to function. I wrote that piece 10 months ago, last August. The idea that universities would encounter something that would cause mass closings seemed very likely. I had no idea that what would happen would be a global viral pandemic…
To think about what has happened during the COVID-19 pandemic from early March onward as a kind of deindustrialization can be in the sense that schools and universities provide an industrial apparatus for students who may not have access to it—things like consistent wi-fi, computer use, or “the shop,” the tools, or the “shop tech” in art schools—that’s now all gone, and evaporated, although we don’t know for how long…I guess what I would hope is that maybe this experience would provoke the question: If this is the art world that we will exist in, what do we make of it? If the art world is not out there, in Chelsea, in a biennial, in a global city somewhere else. If it’s actually here, then what are its grounds for development, and what are the possibilities of transforming it? I think so much of academic discourse that happens within universities, whether it’s in art school or a PhD program, or once you become a faculty member, is about trying to get elsewhere, get into a different conversation, get into a different conference, gallery, whatever it is. That the question of, how do we exist in the space we are in now and how do we reconcile it and transform it, is often not as exciting as the question of, how will it be when we get somewhere else? So this is where we all are now, right?
7. “The Startling Fiction of Fernanda Melchor” by Lucas Iberico Lozada, The Nation
Lucas Iberico Lozada reviews Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season, “the story of a woman killed by her lover. At first, the book’s structure seems to match that of a police procedural, with each chapter circling closer to establishing motive, method, meaning. But… Melchor burrows so deeply into the circumstances of the murder as to shatter them and raise much more discomfiting questions about the everyday—and intimate—nature of violence against women.”
Rather than a simple testimonial or act of witness to this violence, however, Melchor’s virtuosic deployment of slang and bitter insults—of weaponized speech—transforms the violence of her novel and, by extension, the violence of femicide into what Cathy Park Hong calls “an artwork of vengeance.” Hurricane Season is a novel that refuses the call to come together, to overcome, to heal…
Melchor shifts between tones, registers, and tenses effortlessly, striking an extraordinary balance somewhere between pure stream-of-consciousness and chatty conversationalism… Melchor continually breaks outside the confines of individual consciousness, pushing her characters to inhabit, if only briefly, the thoughts and lives of others. The result is stunning…
In an interview after Hurricane Season was released in Mexico, Melchor described literature as trench warfare: If the newspapers insisted on describing men who kill women as aberrant monsters, transformed by love into something evil, she would write a book revealing the everyday monstrousness of violence.
8. “How Tracy Sherrod Came to Lead America’s Oldest Black Publishing Imprint” by Rumaan Alam, Slate
Rumaan Alam interviews Tracy Sherrod, the editorial director of Amistad, about her career:
[Sherrod:] …I left Henry Holt when I went to my publisher, and I asked her to read Sister Souljah’s The Coldest Winter Ever, which was on submission. She told me no, she wouldn’t read it, because someone in the house had said that Sister Souljah was racist…
[Alam:] Your publisher at Holt declining to read a submission that an editor had brought in seems extraordinary to me. We often talk about microaggressions when we talk about race inside the workplace, but that seems like a regular aggression to me.
In the early days, there were all kinds of things that would be said, in the ’80s and ’90s. One being when Barack Obama’s book came in: “We don’t really publish people with nontraditional names.”
You’re talking about Dreams From My Father.
Yes. It came in before he was well known the first time it was published.
The sad part about all that are the books that never got through. We don’t even know what we’re missing…
9. “The Magic Mountains of the Acoma Pueblo and Thomas Mann” by David Treuer, The New York Review of Books
David Treuer writes about the tuberculosis sanatorium at the heart of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, and how it functioned in the novel as a vehicle for an examination of the social ills that had led to World War I:
The war occasioned for Mann a need to look closely at the social illnesses that had made the conflict possible: ethnic pride without solidarity; science without conscience; propriety but no morals; nationalism but no humanism; empty scholasticism that privileged the ability to argue over the need to devote oneself to a cause; the misapplication of heroic ideals to a modern capitalist industrial reality; and, ultimately, a savage vision of the individual and culture.
While thinking about The Magic Mountain, Treuer finds himself lingering over thoughts of a different mountain: the Acoma Pueblo in New Mexico. “[S]ome sixty miles from Albuquerque… Acoma is maybe the oldest continuously inhabited city in North America—the Acoma people have been living atop their mountain, a 357-foot mesa, for over a thousand years.” He relates a recent phone conversation with Brian Vallo, the governor of Acoma:
“Most Acoma don’t live on The Rock, only some do and it’s a hard life up there: no running water, no electricity, no modern conveniences,” he went on. “But they do it because they have spiritual work to do up there, Acoma people are sacred. Everything there [on The Rock] sustains us. Our cultural leaders protect the people and our resources, and they do it for us and for all humanity.”
Vallo said no more and, for a moment, neither did I. The idea that the cultural leaders at Acoma were sitting in constant session and attending to the health of the world—to theirs, to yours, to mine—moved me deeply.
“We look to The Rock on a daily basis,” he resumed, eventually. “One thing that helps us understand this time is that we have a word for the disease. We call it hiya’stíní. We respect it because we understand it as a living being. We fear it and respect it. We acknowledge it and speak to it.”
10. “On Deadly Policing and the 1979 Southall Protests” by David Renton, Lit Hub
An excerpt from Resist: Stories of Uprising about the 1979 Southall Protests in London.
As part of the police investigation into Peach’s killing, the lockers belonging to the half dozen SPG officers who had been in Peach’s vicinity when he was struck were raided. Some 26 unofficial weapons were found, including a leather-covered stick, two knives, a large truncheon, a crowbar, a metal cosh, a whip and a whip handle. The fatal wound had been large—larger, the pathologists advised than an ordinary truncheon—but had not broke Peach’s skin, as a wooden truncheon would have done. But the discovery of these weapons raised wider questions even than Peach’s death. How was it possible for officers to go on demonstrations with their own private weapons such as coshes or knives?
11. “Politics” by Legna Rodriguez Iglesias, Guernica
An excerpt from Legna Rodriguez Iglesias’s story collection My Favorite Girlfriend Was a French Bulldog.
I learned that a man is a country. I learned that a country is a system. I learned that a system is a monster. I learned that a monster is a God. I learned that God doesn’t exist. I learned that God does exist. I learned that I don’t exist. I learned that I do exist. I learned that a man cannot leave, because this is his house, this is his mother, and this is his father.
12. “The Men Who Brought Political Radicalism to Oscar Wilde” by Kristian Williams, Lit Hub
An excerpt from Kristian Williams’s Resist Everything Except Temptation: The Anarchist Philosophy of Oscar Wilde.
Oscar Wilde’s interest in the condition of the working class likely originated at Oxford, under the tutelage of John Ruskin, the moralist, art critic, hater of industrialism, advocate for economic justice, and enthusiast for Gothic architecture. The product of a strict Christian upbringing, Ruskin considered himself both a Tory and a communist…
And so it happened (as Wilde told the story) that at one of Ruskin’s Oxford lectures “he spoke to us not on art this time but on life. He thought, he said, that we should be working at something that would do good to other people, at something by which we might show that in all labour there is something noble.” Soon after, Ruskin “went out round Oxford and found two villages, Upper and Lower Hinksey, and between them there lay a great swamp, so that the villagers could not pass from one to the other without many miles of a round.” Ruskin recruited a group of undergraduates, Wilde among them, to gather in the mornings and build a flower-lined lane to connect the towns…
Together they “worked away for two months at our road.” Only, at last, “like a bad lecture it ended abruptly—in the middle of a swamp.” The school term over, Ruskin left for Venice, and the project was abandoned.
13. “Lady Romeo” by Tana Wojczuk, Bookforum
An excerpt from Tana Wojczuk’s Lady Romeo: The Radical and Revolutionary Life of Charlotte Cushman, America's First Celebrity.
Siddons dressed herself for the part in bridal white, with a nun-like white wimple that framed her guilt-stricken face. Her Lady Macbeth was a woman who used her beauty to seduce Macbeth into doing what she wanted.
Siddons had died in 1831, five years earlier, but thanks to a recent biography she was more on the audience’s mind than ever. Nostalgia elevated the great tragedienne still higher, and Charlotte seemed to be competing with a ghost.
Physically, Charlotte could not have been more different from Sarah Siddons. At five-foot-seven she was a towering figure onstage, taller than most men. Her body was strong, and she moved like a “pythoness.” Far from fragile, Charlotte had what one rival called a “lantern jaw,” wide shoulders, and large breasts and hips—erotic, perhaps, but not traditionally feminine. She had to find a new way to play Lady Macbeth, and quickly.
14. “The Voice of No One Now” by Allan Graubard, The Los Angeles Review of Books
Allan Graubard reviews The Idea of Perfection, a new translation of prose and poetry from Paul Valéry, “a poet who came close to neoclassical perfection, as well as a modern thinker who understood how elusive perfection would always remain.”
A Voice, stately and resonant,
That knows itself, as it rings out,
To be the voice of no one now
Except the forests and the surf!
15. “The Scandal of Our Drug Supply” by Daniel J. Kelves, The New York Review of Books
Daniel J. Kelves reviews Katherine Eban’s Bottle of Lies: The Inside Story of the Generic Drug Boom, which is a book on one of those topics that instantly makes your gut clench up when you read about it:
The FDA’s lack of rigorous, uniform scrutiny of imported pharmaceuticals has put the prescription drug supply in the United States at risk from contaminated, ineffective, and even fraudulent medications—products that not only might fail to control disease but might themselves be life-threatening.
16. “Cat in the Agrahāram and Other Stories – Dilip Kumar” by Bailey Trela, Full Stop
Bailey Trela reviews Dilip Kumar’s Cat in the Agrahāram and Other Stories.
The stories in Cat in the Agrahāram are often rambling in structure, a product of Kumar’s capacious consciousness — his narrative focus trundles along like a camera on a dolly, documenting life as it emerges from the backdrop of the habitual. In “Crossing Over,” an old woman named Gangu Patti has once again raised a disturbing ruckus in the apartment complex where she lives; like clockwork, the reader learns, she threatens to die, only to emerge from her death throes unscathed, the cause of her convulsions revealed to be little more than a buildup of gas.
17 . “‘Have You Considered Socialism?’ Or, The Politics of Fictional Characters” by Andrew Martin, Lit Hub
Rereading the stories in his new collection Cool for America, Andrew Martin thinks about how these stories edited and written during the Obama administration presaged what came next.
…unhappily for the country, I think this sense of foreboding, of unstoppable violence and the inability to face it squarely, exists on a continuity with the recent past rather than having emerged as an aberration from it.
As I read through the stories in this collection now, I see a portrait of psychic trauma that I didn’t understand consciously while I was writing. The problems that these characters are facing are not explicitly understood as political by the people themselves. They are dealing with addiction and despair, grappling with an inchoate sense that things are not as they should be. These are people who are pressed up so close against their problems that they can’t see the bigger picture, rendering themselves more powerless than they need be…
I’m trying to see this moment we’re living through, particularly here in New York, as one of opportunity, one in which the shock and grief and anger we’re feeling might be enough, if we sustain it, to discard and destroy things—Confederate statues, privatized healthcare, overfunded police departments—we’ve been too timid to do anything about.
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